In 2006, the then defence secretary, John Reid, said the 3,000-plus British troops the Blair government agreed to deploy to Helmand province would be "perfectly happy" to leave "without firing a shot". The troops were there, he said, to help reconstruct Afghanistan.
Four years later, after the deaths of nearly 300 British troops there, the new defence secretary, Liam Fox, suggests we are not there to reconstruct Afghanistan at all. "We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th century country," he told the Times on Saturday. We are there, he said, "
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